Lesbi-honest, love is love: New book highlights invisible stories within the LGBTQIA+ community

Dr Shruti Chakravarty (left) and her partner Pooja’s love story is the first in the book

Just days ago, we hear of two women cops in Pune forced to cancel their wedding because of societal and familial pressure. The world feels unkind to any love that looks different. And yet, in the same week, we chance upon Homo And Juliet (Yoda Press, Rs 499), a collection of real queer and lesbian love stories in which we get to see women, as well as non-binary trans folk find their happy endings. Hope surges anew.

Among the eight stories is the author, Dr Shruti Chakravarty's own recollection of how she and Pooja, her partner of nearly nine years, came to be together. But before she could find love, Dr Chakravarty had to find and embrace her own identity, as a "classic, old-fashioned butch lesbian who believes loving a woman is the most glorious gift she could have got".

"Each love story is different. Mine begins when I was 13, and in love with my best friend, a girl. This was in 1993; I immediately internalised it as something very shameful, dirty. And, of course, I hid it from everyone," recalls the queer-feminist activist.

The book features seven other couples whom the author has met either socially or through work

"And then I went on to study psychology, where I was promptly told from the textbook of abnormal psychology that homosexuality is a deviance. It was only when I was 23, and finally took myself to a psychiatrist to get ‘cured', that he looked at me and said, ‘You are normal'. That was my changing point," says Dr Chakravarty, a therapist with over two decades of work in gender, sexuality, and mental health. She is Chief Advisor at the Mariwala Health Initiative and faculty for the Queer Affirmative Counselling Practice course, and holds a PhD from TISS on queer intimacies.

It's her PhD thesis from which this book springs, in an effort to throw light on those who are most invisible and marginalised even among the already marginalised LGBTQIA+ community: lesbians, non-binary, and trans people.

Known on Instagram as @pawlyamorous, the "elder lesbian" (she said it!) has worked for years to throw some light on love and joy looks like for them. The book's tone is similar to her Instagram content, where she talks frankly about relationship dynamics, queer joy, and mistakes "baby queers" tend to make in their journey of self-discovery. She also answers a lot of questions that allies or curious straight people have secretly wondered about.

Like, is being with a butch all that different from being with a man, and are you really lesbian is you're attracted to a masculine woman? The answer, of course, is a resounding "Yes!"

"Men and masculinity are unfortunately pitched as one and the same thing," Dr Chakravarty says, "The butch woman is often misunderstood as a man without ever getting the social and systemic power that a cis-het man has. That's why it's all the more hurtful to call her a man, because you're actually ridiculing her. A femme gets this in visceral ways…. This is the only kind of masculinity she is attracted to."

Neither do butch and femme indicate gender roles within the relationship, she stresses. "We do not have a blueprint for roles in the relationship, unlike cis-het folk. So, everything is decided by the couple on the basis of each person's strength and what gives them confidence. One person might enjoy driving more, another might be a better cook. It takes more work to figure all of this out, but it's worth it."

And butch-femme is not the only dynamic one can observe in lesbian relationships; there are plenty of femme-femme, and masc for masc couples out there too.
"Queer identity is all about fighting the binary imposition, we are not trying to mimic it in our relationships". Really, butch or femme are about gender expression, and how a woman might present to the world, she explains.

Other stories in the book are just as complex, from trans-lesbian love, to asexual partnerships, to femme invisibility, and surviving heartbreak unrequited love.

We've come a long way since she was a scared teenager in the '90s, trying to hide her love for women as a dirty secret. Section 377 is no longer law of the land, and we are free to love whomever we choose. This is something Dr Charakvarty's generation has fought hard for. And yet, the world is no easier to navigate. "There has been a lot of regression to rightwing politics across the world, and whatever rights we have won, there is no way to tell if someday those will be snatched again. It's an uncertain world that young queer people face today," she says.

And that's why it's all the more crucial to bring this book out as evidence of what successful queer love can look like - even if that doesn't always meet society's standards for successful love. "Marriage is not the destination, we say, as long as we can be together, we are trying to also figure out how to be together. In the book, quite a few folk say, ‘I don't know how long this will last, but I work every day to be with her'. Someone else says the question of ‘how long will I be with her' is moot in such a hostile society. If we reach a point where we are not happy with each other, we will harmoniously say goodbye, in a dignified way. We don't ask ‘how long', we say ‘how are we going to be together… what is important to us, what are our shared values'," she says.

As for queer marriage rights, "I personally feel that marriage is an extremely unequal and oppressive structure. I would not want queer people to imitate the marriage structure as it exists today. I believe, however, that all people - queer or heterosexual - should have partnership rights so they can love the way they want to. That includes being able to make medical decisions for each other, end of life decisions, get a loan together…"